Hot prospects: a sobering IPCC report

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. I'm your host Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. In late 2019, Bolivia held a presidential vote in which quite a few things didn't seem right. Was the election stolen? Was it a coup? Nearly two years on, these questions are still being asked and still having a crippling effect on the country's politics. And the greater the success for a first time novelist, the greater the dread of the expectations of a follow up. Our data team looks into the well known but not much studied effect of the difficult second novel. First up, though.

You've been telling us for over three decades of the dangers of allowing the planet to warm. The world listened but didn't hear. The world listened but it did not act strongly enough. And as a result, climate change is a problem that is here now. Nobody is safe and it's getting worse faster.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has a long history of choosing its words carefully. But in the latest landmark report from.

The UN's Global Climate Authority, released this.

Morning, the tone is shifting. For years there was a whisper of uncertainty, of unwillingness to make definitive and damning statements. It's clear from the words of IPCC Chairman Ho Sung Lee that reluctance is.

Going first, it tells us that it is indisputable that human activities are causing climate change and making extreme weather events more frequent and severe. Second, it shows that climate change is affecting every region on our planet. And lastly, it explains that strong, rapid, sustained reductions in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions would be required to limit global warming.

These are sobering assessments, the last trench of research the IPCC will publish ahead of a mammoth climate meeting in Glasgow later this year.

This is the most comprehensive assessment of the physical science behind climate change that the IPCC has released in eight years.

Rachel Dobbs writes about climate Change.

For the Economist, it represents a huge commitment, but by scientists. There are 234 report authors going over thousands and thousands of papers, it says, with much more certainty than we've ever had, what is driving climate change, how human actions impact on it, what the effects of it will be, and the ways that we can avoid some of the worst consequences. And its conclusions make pretty grim reading.

So what are those conclusions? What's the report saying?

So this report finds that even if countries were to drastically reduce their greenhouse gas emissions now, and none of them are currently showing a consistent downward trend of any sort, the world would likely breach 1.5 degrees Celsius of temperature rise above pre industrial levels within the next 20 years, which very strongly calls into question the world's ability to meet the goals laid out by the Paris Agreement, which committed to keeping temperatures below 2 degrees and preferably to 1.5. This report also goes through again something that was introduced by the IPCC in their previous report, which is the idea of the world's carbon budget, which is how much more carbon dioxide we could emit before we hit that 1.5 degree marker. They calculate that we can release just 500 billion more tons of carbon dioxide, which is about 15 years of industrial emissions at the rates that we're currently going to. For that to be achievable, for us to stay within our carbon budget, that would mean that everyone in the world, every country, not just the developed countries, would have to be at NET 0 by 2050, which would be a phenomenally.

Large ask is that to say then that the minimum hope of the Paris Agreement, that 1.5 degrees of warming is now functionally impossible.

So the report was very careful not to say this. It is going to be very, very difficult. The report does discuss a possibility under which we would Predict reach the 1.5 temperature limit by 2050, but then through various measures, including the removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, that would swing back down under 1.5 by the end of the century and start to stabilise. However, the IPCC will have a much more detailed report on mitigation measures coming out in March of next year, which will go into that much more clearly.

And what does the report have to say about the effects of climate change that we're seeing more of all the time?

So this report goes into far more detail than any of its predecessors in describing the effects of climate change that we're actually seeing. And the science that went into that was a real sea change from the last report. Therefore, this report is able to be much more assertive about the effects actually happening. It's now using multiple lines of evidence, which is this physical, lived experience, as well as models and projections. And something that they really, really are able to show is that climate change is affecting every inhabited region across the globe, and that human influence is contributing to observed changes absolutely everywhere. Something that's also interesting about this report is that they say human influence is completely unequivocal in causing climate change, which is something that they have never been able to state as broadly before.

And so in that sense, this report represents a real step ahead in the world's understanding of climate change.

Yes. And the fact that this report is written from the perspective of climate change already happening, rather than it being a threat looming on the horizon that hasn't arrived yet, chimes with the experience of a lot of people, even those outside of the climate community. We have seen a huge amount of extreme weather events this summer, including the flooding in Germany, the wildfires that are currently burning in California and that were very destructive in Turkey and are still alight in Greece. Something that is interesting to note here is that the IPCC released a special report in 2018 on what 1.5 degrees of warming would mean for the world, and that coincided with an incredibly destructive wildfire season in California, where the town of paradise was essentially razed to the ground. And that combination galvanised an awful lot of climate activism. And I think you could see something similar here.

So in that sense, you think this report will make a real difference? I mean, it must be said that each one of these mammoth reports that the IPCC puts out seems more dire than the last. Is the biggest, the best understanding yet. And yet, here we are.

Still, I think it could make a real difference. It will be very notable to see how this report ties into the negotiations that are coming at COP26, which is the UN climate summit in November in Glasgow. Yes, we have been reading bad news of this type for a very long time, and there is basically no scenario in which the experiences that we're having because of climate change will not get worse, because we are going to see more warming from what we currently have. However, I think it is important to note that this should not be a cause for utter pessimism. Even after we do break 1.5 degrees, every single degree of warming will make more of a difference. And therefore, everything that the world can do to both mitigate and to adapt to that, and adaptation is increasingly going to be incredibly important, will make huge difference to people's lives and Livelihoods. And what happens now is going to be entirely dependent on the political process and the political will that countries can muster.

Rachel, thank you very much for joining us.

Thank you, Jason.

It's now almost two years since a presidential election in Bolivia and a conflict that then convulsed the country, leading to street protests. The country remains gripped by a central question of whether or not what happened was a fraud or a coup.

There's certainly a gray area as to what you call what happened in 2019.

Sarah Maslin writes about South America for the Economist.

So in a nutshell, in October 2019, left wing president Evo Morales, who had been in power for more than a decade, was running for his fourth term. But after a very close election with a lot of irregularities, Bolivians take to the streets for weeks alleging there was fraud. The Organization of American States comes out with a report showing dozens of irregularities. The protests get even more violent. The military and the police mutiny. And the commander of the military goes on television suggesting that Evo Morales resign. And at this point, Morales is agreeing to new elections, but things have gotten so out of control that a few hours later he gives a speech, resigning.

Proceedings.

And then what happens after this, many other high level people in Evo Morales government resign and there is a power vacuum. And according to the Constitution, the person who's next in line is the second vice president of the Senate, a right wing senator called Janine Anes. She comes in and after negotiations declares herself president and is sworn in.

Conform al texo y centido de la constitucion.

But pretty quickly it becomes clear that Jeanine Agnes is not just planning to be a transition president who's thinking about holding new elections quickly. Rather, she starts changing the political direction, changing foreign policy, and behaving in ways that really add fuel to the flame of Morales and others, insisting that there was a coup. And so that's the situation that Bolivia is in October of last year when they finally are able to hold a new election. Everyone thought it was going to be very close, but at the end of the day, the mosque wins and comes back into power. The winner of the election was Luis Arce. He wins with a very convincing majority and the election is by all accounts completely legitimate.

So mas Evo Morales party comes back into power. Why doesn't that settle the story of.

What happened in 2019?

So Arce had promised on the campaign trail not to seek revenge against Agnes and go after people in her government. But once he gets into office, his response really starts to follow the same path as Jeanine Agnes. Cases are launched against people from the interim government. Agnes and a number of her ministers are arrested. And the mosque seems to be very committed more than anything else on changing the narrative of what happened in 2019 from a chaotic situation following fraud to one of a long planned and coldly executed coup against the Morales government.

But what would be behind that? Why not put this Tibet Hamas is back in power, things could be heading for stability. So what's the political calculation there?

So the protests in 2019 were extremely traumatic for Bolivia. They resulted in the deaths of 35 people in circumstances that still aren't completely clear. So there is a little legitimate desire on the part of people who were involved, who lost family members, including in some cases at the hands of the security forces, to figure out what happened and hold those who are responsible accountable. But I spoke with some of the relatives of nine men who were killed at a protest in the chaotic days after Agnes took office in 2019. These relatives of the victims told me that they feel like they're being used as a political weapon to go after the previous right wing government and haven't actually really seen anything in terms of justice for the family members that they lost.

Okay, so those relatives see it as a political point scoring exercise.

I mean, is it. How is the current government trying to.

Push its version of events?

One of the main ways is that they're using the courts and Bolivia's judicial system to push this narrative in the eyes of society. But the problem is that the cases are going forward in a country where everyone knows that the justice system bends to the will of whoever happens to be in power. So under Ms. Agnes, prosecutors very quickly opened cases against Evo Morales for fraud, corruption, terrorism, sedition, and then the very same prosecutors and judges practically as soon as Arce 1 archived most of those cases and then went on to open new cases against Agnes administration for some of the very same crimes. Corruption, terrorism, sedition. More than 60 people from her administration have now been charged. And according to international organizations like Human Rights Watch, a lot of the actual charges are very weak. The evidence is lacking, and it really looks like the way that they've gone about pursuing, pursuing the cases is more of revenge justice than a legitimate effort to figure out the truth of what happened and hold those who are responsible accountable for any possible crimes.

So it sounds as if then this pushing of the narrative this way and that can just carry on then what do the people of Bolivia make of the changing story around them?

So in my conversations with Bolivians, what I heard was a real fatigue with this question of whether there was fraud or whether it was a coup. They feel caught in between these two narratives and they wish that the government would just move on and focus on things that the country needs. I met a 22 year old college student named Paola who was selling leather bags and textiles. And she said at this point, 20 months later, people are just sick of politics. They want jobs, vaccines and food and and they wish that politicians would realize what the population realizes, which is that if they keep going through this same narrative forever, the country is never really going to be able to heal and move on.

Sarah, thanks very much for joining us.

Thanks Jason.

For more analysis like this from our international network of correspondence, take out a subscription to the Economist. Get a great introductory deal@Equality.com IntelligenceOffer the link is in the show Notes. As debut novels go, Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird was a smash hit, released to instant success in 1960, eventually winning a Pulitzer Prize and being turned into an Oscar winning film starring Gregory Peck.

I'm no idealist to believe firmly in the integrity of our courts and of our jury system. That's no ideal to me. That is a living, working reality.

How to follow up on that kind of success? Decades later, a draft of another chapter in the story was discovered. Go Set a Watchman was published at last in 2015. This time around, reviewers weren't kind. It was a manifestation of a fear that many first time authors have, one that's become a saying in its own right. Difficult second novel. It's an effect that work by our data team suggests is real.

We did some analysis to see whether readers actually did think second novels were worse than author's first novels.

Edwin Latimer is a data journalist for the Economist.

We looked at data from Goodreads on the top 1,000 authors who'd written two books. By reviews, we find that the average rating for a first book is actually slightly lower than the second book.

Well, that does seem counterintuitive given how anxious authors are about their second books. How did you figure that out?

So the first thing we did was look at the headline averages. So in our sample, the average rating for the first book was 3.87 out of 5. And for the second book it was actually 3.9 out of 5, which suggests that second novels aren't so difficult after all. It was very surprising when I saw that because I'd been reading lots of blogs about how difficult second novels were. But we dug a little bit deeper and I found that there was an explanation for it.

Go on.

What's the issue here?

The issue is that headline ratings are affected by both how good the book is and who rates the book. And we should note that people who rate and enjoy an author's first book are more likely to read their second book. That then can bias the results. Of the people who rated an author's first book 5 out of 5, 31% of them went on to read their second book. Whereas the people who didn't like the author's first book and rated it 1 out of 5, only 8% of them went on to read the author's second book. And that means that readers of an author's second book are more likely to be inclined to like that author's writing. And that could then bias up the ratings of the second book.

So to tackle the broader question of whether that second novel is really genuinely more difficult or with less successful outcomes, how do you adjust for that first readership bias?

We adjust for that bias by making a fair comparison between the two books. And to do that, we look at people who rated both books. The ratings for the author's first book is actually considerably higher than their second book. So the average rating for the first book is 4.17 out of 5 and the average rating for the second book is 4.03 out of 5. Both of the ratings are higher amongst the wider group because people who read both books tend to like the books. But noticeably the first book is rated higher than the second book after making that adjustment, which does seem to suggest that second novels are in fact more difficult to make successful than first novels.

But the difference between the two isn't that big. I mean, how solid is that average? Should a first time novelist just sort of pack it in after the first one?

No, I don't think they should pack it in after the first one. It's only a 3% drop. It's worth noting that often an author's first book, they spent years and years getting to the point of getting it published. And then often what is the issue with the second book is that they have a much shorter amount of time which they've agreed with their publisher to get the second book published. I think it does suggest that it is difficult to write a follow up to a successful hit.

But did any of the authors in the data buck that trend of declining quality?

A third of authors in our data set actually had their second book rated more highly. Amongst readers who rated both books, a notable exception is Nick Hornby's About a Boy, which was his second book and was rated 4.33 out of 5amongst our sample, while High Fidelity, his first book, was rated only 3.59 out of 5.

5.

Sparrow fought for Harper Lee, though she suffered the second highest ratings drop amongst all the novels in our data. Her second novel, Go Set a Watchman, only received a 3.22 out of five, a 30% decline from the successful To Kill a Mockingbird.

Edwin, thank you very much for joining us.

Thanks, Jason.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. If you like us, leave us a rating and a review and we'll see you back here tomorrow.